Red

Today's Thursday and the colour of the week is Red/Pink

Red has been my favourite colour forever.

The Red Book. An ongoing project which my friend the illustrator Priya and I are participating in. We have two identical red books, in its pages are being created a visual conversation, there are elaborate exchanges of the books from time to time so the conversations hop scotch between the two red books.My keys.

R marks his territory with candy wrappers. He's partial to Maha Lacto made by Nutrine. The black sofa and four remote controls are all his territory when he's home.
Red is of special significance in India. Its an auspicious colour. These are little pouches for jewellery. A decade or more back, small pieces of jewellery were wrapped in magenta tissue paper and put into a box by the jeweller, I'm sure that still happens in the villages. Magenta and Fuschia are the pinks which are characteristic of India.I think it was Zandra Rhodes who said Magenta is the Navy Blue of India.

I've stayed up past midnight so its officially Thursday when I publish this post.Its a holiday today and we are off early for a four day break in the Nilgiris.I'm wondering what to do about Blue which is the colour for Friday.

Orange

Wednesday is Orange day during Colour Week.


Oranges

The skies opened up and it came down in sheets last night. What a relief after days of the heat building up.Reminds me of the day I bought this bag. It was pouring cats and dogs and there was a black thunderstorm warning. My sister and I were waiting to meet someone at the Kowloon train stop and since we had time we decided to explore and see what was in the shops close to the station. One was a leather shop - Babila, and I just had to have this bag.It reminds me of my holiday in Hong Kong with Piyo, Z & M and Disney.

Yellow

Tuesday is for all things YELLOW.

When I tried to think of the yellow things in the house I could only think of this cruet set my sister gave me.

Quite amazing how much you actually see because when I began looking there was plenty of yellow in the house.

Banganapalli mangoes.With the onset of summer the mangos have begun to appear. Alphonsos, Imampasand, Neelam, umpteen varieties of mangoes varying in colour, flavour, texture but all so yummy.

Turmeric or Haldi which is yellow adds colour and flavour to the potato masala. Food that's yellow is more appetising visually. ( Did that make any sense?) Apparently that's why we don't have food that's blue in colour, usually.

My collection of National Geographic magazines. Nestled amongst the books I found this happy chap - also yellow.

Thanks Leya for having Colour Week I'm being more observant of my surroundings and the things around me.

Colour Week - If its Monday it must be Green

Leya of Curious Bird is hosting Colour Week.

Its very simple - all you need to do is photograph things around you of the particular colour for the day of the week and post them on your blog. You would have to leave acomment on Leya's blog so she can do a roundup.Read more about it here.

The colours for the week are as follows

Monday - Green

Tuesday - Yellow

Wed - Orange

Thursday - Pink/Red

Friday - Blue

I'm photographing things around the house, so here's Green for Monday.

I've discovered I have a lot of green things in the house. R eats his museli every morning from this green bowl, the green plate is some of the first pieces of crockery I bought in Ahmedabad after we got married, I have three left.The bowl and plate are resting on my kitchen counter which is a black and green granite. Tea we love and the honey lemon green tea is delicious.

As an apartment dweller with no balcony I have plants on my window sill, so its a tiny garden. This is my bowl of water cabbages and the pretty white veined leaves of another plant I don't know the name of, anyone out there who does?

April TIF is now complete

I've completed my TIF piece for April. Here's a detail of the tree which symbolises an urgent need to change in order to avert a global climate crisis.

I hope Blogger will oblige and permit you to view an enlarged version of the image belowwhen you click on it. Some of the text is not clearly visible. In orange is http://www.climatecrisis.net/ and below that in brown is Earth Day- April 22.

Here are both the pages of the April TIF.

I'm happy to report that all the tussar silk, sequins, beads and embroidery thread came from my stash of craft things The base fabric for the piece itself is a laundry bag from a hotel, I've been recycling these laundry bags and using them as the base for all my TIF pieces. That's an attempt to walk the talk - reduce, reuse and recycle.

Progress on the April TIF

The tree which is in full bloom symbolizes change.We need to make changes and more educated choices to reverse global warming and the climate crisis.

Have to start work on the page on the left which will have more text. The tree made of tussar silk applique and sequins. All these are from my stash. I haven't had to go out and buy a thing thus far.
Detail of the foliage and flowers on the tree.The colours are loosely based on the palette for this month.

I think I'll have the pages for April completed by the end of the month.

Reunion to Remember

Boarding school and a decade of it together had brought us back together again,after a year of e-mailing, planning, scheduling, rescheduling and then going back to the original schedule - April 12th & 13th, just the girls, no spice or children.

Time to bare our souls, bitch and let it all hang out, we had an absolute blast remembering and reminiscing. Tea and cream horns started us off.Isn't it amazing what strong memories food can evoke? (Thanks COW for the supply of cream horns) Cream horns and elephant ears were for tea on Saturday or Sunday at school.Yum!
SOUP: The food was terrible
Chorus of voices : Noooooo! / It was fantastic / Just never enough./Remember eating K's coconut oil ? /Wasn't the jaggery tart fantastic! Does anybody make jaggery tart?/ What about the spinach on toast , what went into it?

Catching up on 20 odd years which have gone by since we left school. Nothing like sitting down and catching up with someone face to face even with the wonders of e-mail,skype and the web cam.( Age catching up with me, you think?) All of us had stories to tell of significant times in our lives - meeting the significant other/s in our lives, children, much to laugh about, must say we all have a fantastic sense of humour. Our memories are pretty good with T around no fear of forgetting even a teeny weeny detail.How many classmates do you know who can break into song and keep singing song after song. I think we surprised ourselves because we remembered the words of all the songs we chose to sing.

Discussions and tips

Vaastu tip we all took away from this particular discussion - money must be kept in the South West corner of your house.Did I get that right?

To set a perfect bowl of curd/yogurt put in option 1. a whole green chilly, option 2. stalk of the green chilly. Please try both options and see which one works for you.

Need for regular medical check-ups now that the Fabulous Decade lies ahead.

Needless to say with the photographic evidence provided what an important role food plays in all our lives and it won't take much to trigger memories of this weekend - Mysore pak from Sri Krishna Sweets, Kellogg's sugar free cereal and Slim milk, lunch at Fresco's and desserts made by Rahila. Mmmm Yum!

Safe trips home everybody. We're getting together again next year to amaze Thailand!!!!

In the mean time I hope everybody can have a fabulous reunion of some sort its quite something, I like to think of it as a spa for the spirit.

April - Take It Further Challenge

Around the time Sharon announced the challenge -"How do you see change? That is the challenge topic this month", and colour palette for April I watched the Oscar winning movie An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore.A bit heavy on facts and figures but they are required I guess to drive home the point that there is a climate crisis which has dire consequences for all of us but there is a little ray of hope which is heavily dependant on the need to change.

I think there will be a tussle in most people's attitude to change as far as climate crisis is concerned but I think there are so many areas where small changes can be made in our lives without actually affecting the quality of our lives.We really need to do all we can to make those changes.

Along with the credits for the movie An Inconvient Truth, lines of text appear on the screen which actually spoke to me more than the movie itself and I'm going to be incorporating it into my TIF piece for April. Here are some of those lines which I wrote down

"Are you ready to change the way you live? The Climate Crisis can be solved.
You can reduce your carbon emissions.
Buy energy efficient appliances - lightbulbs.
Recycle
When you can, walk or ride a bicycle
When you can, use light rail and mass transit
Switch to renewable sources of energy
Plant trees, lots of trees
If you believe in prayer , pray that people will find the strenght to change.
In the words of the old African proverb: When you pray,move your feet.
Learn as much as you can about the climate crisis. Then put your knowledge into action."

I've made concious decisions in a bid to reduce consumption of resources in an attempt to slow and reduce the climate crisis
I buy food and fruit which are locally produced and which are in season.
Shut off all appliances when not in use such as computer, television etc and never use the standby option.
Try and remember to carry a shopping bag with me so I won't have to bring more plastic shopping bags home. ( I need to do a better job of this one)
To buy stuff only if its necessary, find ways to recycle or help the process of recycling like separating my garbage. R's mantra which I like to remember when I have to decide whether I should buy something or not - there are things which are nice to have and those which you need to have.
Living on the ground floor is not at all bad in summer with the fan on, so each year when summer rolls around R's idea of an air conditioner in our bedroom is vetoed, 10 years is a good record I think!
We replaced our car recently and opted for one that's fuel efficient over those which make a statement and give you power and less kilometers to the litre of petrol.
I'm sure I can do more and must educate myself.

Now to the pages for the April - TIF
On the left hand page I'm going to have bits of text and on the right are the beginnings of a tree which is my symbol for change.

As in previous months I'm going back to my stash of stuff and using what I have.

On one of my web wanderings I came across The Story of Stuff . Take a look and if you, like me sees Global warming and the Climate crisis as a situation which needs to be reversed/ changed for generations to come I promise you, you won't be disappointed and watch An Inconvenient Truth as well.

Yogurt Fruit Cake

Ah Priya I didn't have the heart to disappoint you so here's what I baked this long weekend.Being Ugadi and all.

A Yogurt Fruit Cake.

I like simple straightforward recipes with no fancy gagetry or ingredients and quantities must be in cups and teaspoons etc, I won't attempt a recipe that's in grams or pounds,pints or litres. For one thing I don't intend investing in weighing scales i don't have anywhere to store it, conversions from pounds to grams drive me nuts, temperature conversions are bad enough and there's no getting around that because my microwave convection oven has temperatures in degrees C and most recipes are in degrees F!

This is a perfect recipe fulfills all my above requirements and what's more its illustrated in fabulous colour!!! How could I resist when I have my own little embroidered recipes project going on. Thanks Caroline, I really enjoy the illustations and views on your blog.

I made the cake with strawberries and mango. Yes, the first mangoes have begun to appear in fruit shops. I think a scoop of plain vanilla ice cream would be great with this cake.

To round off this post here's good wishes for Ugadi , ( the new year for Kannadiga's which was yesterday). Thanks Priya for the translation.

Hosa Dina New Day
Hosa Nagu New Laughter
Hosa Chiguru New shoots (as in shoots and leaves)
Hosa Kanasu New dreams
Hosa Daari New ways/roads
Hosa Jeevana New life
Hosa Varsha (New year)Nimma Jeevanadalli ellaHosathnanavu tharali

In your life, let the new year (Hosa varsha), bring all kinds of newness

Santhoshadha Ugadi! Happy Ugadi!

March TIF Complete

Here are the pages for March. I chose to explore running stitch. I discovered that a little thing like staggering the running stitch in consecutive rows ( page on the left) versus having them directly above the stitches in the previous row ( page on the right) altered the outcome and the kind of patterns which were created.

Details of some areas.

April is here and the challenge in one word is "Change". Now that I have three pages finished I must start assembling them into the book.